Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Technology

Submission + - Pricing hacks of online retailers (dodgycoder.net)

Submitted by damian2k
damian2k writes: The well known and less well known tricks that online retailers employ to encourage you to buy products and services from their website. Pricing hacks of online retailers covers tricks such as the power of "free", per-customer limits, dynamic pricing, time limits, the 9 factor, easy math, pay what you want, freemium, no dollar signs and X for $X.
Programming

Submission + - Coding tricks of game developers (dodgycoder.net)

Submitted by damian2k
damian2k writes: Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So what sort of tricks do they use while they're under the pump, doing 12+ hour per day for weeks on end?

How about changing the background story of a game to suit a bug, or even just leaving the bug in there and making it a humorous feature of the game! There's also the game studio who keep a pair of white gloves handy, just in case you need to code up some particularly nasty hack and you don't want to feel dirty when you do it! Read more at the article here: http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-developers.html

Comment Chinese number combos (Score 1) 102

by damian2k (#38467528) Attached to: Chinese Developer Forum Leaks 6 Million User Credentials
english 'iloveyou' is at #26 but the Mandarin for the same is 'wo ai ni' ... 'woaini1314' is at #83. the 1314 means "forever" ... because it sounds like forever when pronounced in Cantonese. At #93 is '5845201314' - when pronounced in mandarin - 'wo fa shi, wo ai ni, yi san yi si'. ... which sounds like - "i swear to love you forever and ever"... More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_in_Chinese_culture#Combinations

Comment Re:The Internet vs. Cable TV (Score 1) 283

by damian2k (#38444662) Attached to: Law Professors On SOPA and PIPA: Don't Break the Internet
I think the analogy you are after here is that media corporations really want a "CLOSED" Internet that is compliant and fully under their control, as opposed to an "OPEN" Internet which they can't control ... its the inevitable swing back to a closed technology, as happened with the telegraph (started off open then became dominated by western union) and the telephone (started off open then dominated by AT&T). The problem is that the technologies behind the Internet will make it extremely difficult to pull this off, but this may be the first salvo in the battle.

Comment Re:computing power scales exponentially (Score 1) 156

by damian2k (#38339264) Attached to: World's First Programmable Quantum Photonic Chip

I suspect this is powerful enough computing power that there will be an argument to keep it restricted to "the cloud". Too much power for the average citizen, more than anyone but a terrorist would need, that kinda thing.

Erm, that's what they said about the first ever computer, you know, the quote that went: "there is a global market for a total of 8 computers" or something.

Comment two classes of people with computer skills (Score 1) 1

by damian2k (#38311824) Attached to: Malaysia mull compulsory registration of tech work
> The draft Computing Professionals Bill proposes to create two classes of people with computer skills:
> - A lower class of “Registered Computing Practitioner” — people without degrees in computing; and
> - An upper class of “Registered Computing Professional” — graduates in computing

Erm ... so these two have the same acronym ... RCP
they would be better off going with CM (code monkey) and SE (sofware engineer) ;-)
Software

Submission + - Businesses Can Lose Millions To "Technical Debt" (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Sometimes, innovation isn’t just about new and compelling products, but about new ways of looking at problems. CAST Software released a report on application software health that examines the cost of “technical debt” to a company’s bottom line. Technical Debt is calculated as the cost of fixing the structural quality problems in an application that, if left unfixed, put the business at serious risk. The study looked at the structural quality of 745 IT applications, which represent 365 million lines of code. There were five categories the study measured, namely security, performance, robustness, and the ease of software transferability and changeability. The primary result: companies incurred an average technical debt of $3.61 per line of code."

Submission + - Malaysia mull compulsory registration of tech work (wordpress.com) 1

Submitted by Viceice
Viceice writes: Hot on the heels of recently passed legislation further restricting Freedom of Assembly, the National Front led Malaysian Government is now working to make the registration of all Tech workers mandatory, making it an offence punishable by a stiff fine and jail for anyone to plan, deploy, service and maintain any computing system without a license.

A leaked draft of the legislation has ignited a backlash among the IT community, which fear the law, when passed, will be devastating to the tech industry in Malaysia.
Australia

Submission + - New Australian court victory for Samsung against A (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "Samsung will finally be able to launch its Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in just in time for Christmas after the High Court lifted the ban preventing its sale in Australia and refused Apple's expedited special leave application. Apple had attempted to appeal an earlier court ruling overturning the ban.

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/11/30/0326254/australian-federal-court-ends-ban-on-samsung-galaxy-tab-sales"

Slashdot Top Deals

Happiness is twin floppies.

Close